Startup executives give up dream jobs to work for non-profits

This is a small but growing crowd of technology executives who are quitting their careers midway to walk on the path of setting up non-profits.Krithika Krishnamurthy | ET Bureau | August 20, 2015, 08:15 IST

This is a small but growing crowd of high-flying technology executives who are quitting their stellar careers midway to walk on the unorthodox path of setting up non-profits.BENGALURU: Atul Satija, a former InMobi-Google executive, wants to pull 1 million people out of poverty by 2020. Chalam Plachikkat, who headed the international consumer gift card business for Amazon in Seattle, wants to transform Indian government schools into aspirational educational institutes of tomorrow.

Phalgun Raju, a former Nokia-InMobi executive, wants to identify leaders that she can deploy to solve tough problems like water access, debt-bonded slavery, among others.

This is a small but growing crowd of high-flying technology executives who are quitting their stellar careers midway to walk on the unorthodox path of setting up non-profits. A desire to create massive impact, tackle the real tough problems and a requisite financial security to pursue it, is spurring this trend.

“Elon Musk wants to take people to space. That’s great! I can’t do that. But this is something I can do,” said Plachikkat, who joined non-profit Sikshana a few months ago.

These executives think “scale” and come equipped with the execution chops required to execute it. Sikshana, which has Accel Partners’ Prashant Prakash as its chairman, works with government schools and helps students acquire necessary reading and arithmetic skills before they enter high school.

It creates mechanisms for engaging parents with government schools and motivating students by innovative methods across 1,100 schools in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra, covering over 1.8 lakh students. Plachikkat is on the lookout for funds to scale Sikshana’s operations.

Satija’s challenge is different. He wants to run The Nudge Foundation as a startup, constantly innovating, setting quarterly targets, and bringing in accountability so he can get to a place where he can pay his employees as per market standard.

“There are lot of passionate people, smart people...but the corporate DNA where we formally nurture innovation by creating an environment where people think creatively, collaborate, brainstorm. How do you build the culture here?” said Satija.

“Atul is possessed. For the last eight years, he has been talking of eradicating poverty,” said Sanjay Ramakrishnan, co-founder at IceCream Labs and a former colleague of Satija at Google.

Balakrishna Adiga, a former IBM veteran, said the financial security and the skills they possess gives them the confidence to take this plunge. “If today my son wants to do something, he would not have to worry. My first priority was to create financial security,” said Adiga, who is an angel investor and an advisor to many enterprise startups in Bengaluru.